3 Reasons Why Your Store Needs a Self Serve Customer Portal

What is a Customer Self-Edit Portal (also known as a Customer Self-Service Portal)? Well, it is when a store has a method of allowing customers to edit their order from that store until some time X, usually until that order is fulfilled. This may seem like a “Nice to have” rather than a necessity. Well, here are three reasons why you may think otherwise:

1. Reduce the support time spent on changing the order

Let us run through a scenario. 

Customer A places order B from Store C. 

They contact Store C’s support, because they realize that they messed up and would rather order something else. 

Store C’s representative then talks to them (via email or otherwise) and figures out what Customer A would like to change the order to. 

Store C’s representative then, depending on the size of the store, edits the order themselves or tells another person to do it.

This entire interaction costs time. Time, frankly that neither your support staff nor you have. Support hours should be spent dealing with actual customer issues, not changes to orders

2. Reduce Shipping Headache

Let us run through another scenario. 

Customer A places order B through Store C

When Store C looks to fulfill the order, they realize the shipping address the Customer inputs is wrong (for whatever reason, usually just an old address) 

OR

Customer A realizes the shipping address they input is wrong

THEN

Store C and Customer A spend time talking to each other to agree on a correct shipping  address

OR 

None of them realize and the order is sent to a random location. The store owner thinks that the order was delivered successfully while the customer is angry that the order never arrived.

An unhappy customer leaves a bad review.

Confused store owner. 

Mitigate unhappy customers and support time spent on interactions such as these. 

3. Reduce Returns

For this one, no scenario is needed. If a customer can change their order up until fulfillment, then that means they will not have to wait for the order to arrive, send it back, and then order whatever they wanted to order in the first place. This saves the store time handling this return, and it saves the customer time as well. If the customer has the product faster, then their feedback is faster too, something that is invaluable to a store owner.